In recent years, avionics engineers have endeavored to enhance situational awareness and reduce the navigation related work load required of pilots and flight crews. One approach has been to provide the flight crew with a vertical flight path presentation of a particular flight plan.
While this approach does have several beneficial aspects, it has several shortcomings. First of all, is merely a 2-dimensional or cross sectional view of a flight path. Flight crews are required to process information from two separate displays to fully understand the horizontal and vertical aspects of a flight plan. This assimilation of two display types may result in undesirable use of the flight crews attention.
Consequently, there exists a need for an improved system for displaying flight path information.